Country Lovers

by Fiona Walker

  ‘I can’t believe that was the first time we’ve made love all this year, baby,’ she sighed as he pulled on his pants and headed into the bathroom.

  ‘Huh?’ He brought out a loo roll and threw it to her.

  ‘Romantic!’ She caught it and unrolled some to clean herself up.

  ‘This is the first day of the year.’ Aleš often missed her ironic jokes, especially after sex. ‘I made flight change especially.’

  Bridge was just as guilty of abandoning thoughts. It had taken an hour from her husband coming home – and five minutes after he’d come – for her to sit up in shock now and ask, ‘Where are the kids?’

  *

  Luca followed Ronnie down from the yard to flat pasture where Beck was prowling the round pen, a white lion in his cage.

  ‘Where d’you find him?’

  ‘Sold through a little West Country auction ring, can you believe? No papers of course. Must have changed hands a dozen or more times before that. His provenance had long gone – came with a replacement passport with the name Beckham – but my auctioneer friend spotted that he was branded and entire, so did some microchip detective work and called me. Astonishing he still had his bollocks on, isn’t it?’

  Luca said nothing, thinking the horse lucky to still be alive at all.

  As they approached the pen, Beck began to charge around again, snorting wildly, a fast-moving blur kicking up sand.

  ‘He’s his own worst enemy, poor chap,’ Ronnie sighed as they waited for the wall of death circles to slow enough for Luca to go in. ‘We’ve tried turning him out on grass, but he panics and breaks every fence. He’s not been ridden in over a year. I refuse to give up on him; he’s a grandson of Heraldik and elite graded, which as you know is to sports breeding what a newly discovered, signed Picasso was to the art world.’

  ‘I bet you’re popular.’

  ‘He won’t mount the dummy and he tries to savage his mares. I can’t stand him at stud until we sort that out. That’s why I need you on his case straight away. If we can get his name out there by March, there’s a chance we’ll have a full book. I’ve done a bit of word of mouth, but I can hardly spread the word far if he’s going to try to kill all his wives.’

  He felt hollow with relief. That meant few people knew the horse was here. He could get him across to Ireland, maybe. If he persuaded Ronnie he’d never be safe to breed from, she might buy into the idea. ‘You need a better temperament if you want eventers.’

  ‘Two of his sons were BuCha finalists last year…’ she said, shooting him a wise look.

  Making the final of BuCha – or Bundeschampionate, Germany’s showcase for young event horses – was the Holy Grail.

  ‘My mares all have temperaments sweet enough for two. Look at him!’ She threw up her arms and he floated in circles like a swan. ‘He’s utter class. He had the best grading scores in his year by a mile; his sire’s frozen semen still commands four figures a squirt; his half-brother’s five-star. He cost more than a Cheltenham town house at the sales as a weanling and sold for more than a Chelsea one before the London Olympics.’

  Luca knew all this, of course. He’d been thrown in as part of the deal, the travelling Nanny McPhee tasked with keeping the notoriously tricky horse sweet while his new rider formed a bond. Instead, the boy and the stallion had almost killed one another. Had it not been for Luca’s intervention, one of them would undoubtedly be dead.

  ‘What was it you were going to tell me about him earlier?’ asked Ronnie. ‘The phone call interrupted us.’ The wise blue gaze that saw straight to his truth was tight on his face now.

  Luca looked away, briefly reliving that awful night: running from the apartment block to the stables, hearing the screams from Bechstein and then the young prince. Racing along the corridor, blood on the shavings, splintered wood, the smell of fear and sweat rising like mustard gas. He could never describe the hell of it, even supposing he hadn’t pledged his silence, the prince’s loyal courtier, the door to a gilded shark cage always open if he needed it.

  ‘He was about the trickiest horses I ever rode,’ he said truthfully. ‘Not just sharp – flying daggers coming from all directions. Get unbalanced and he’d have you eating sawdust before you knew what hit you. Sure, he’s brilliant. He was fearless once. But he’s always been unstable; it was like riding uranium.’

  It had been criminally irresponsible to sell a horse like Beck to a young and inexperienced rider, however many millions Paul Fuchs had pocketed from an indulgent Arab royal whose son wanted to play at being an international showjumper. Somebody should have spoken up.

  Luca should have screamed dissent to the air-conditioned indoor school rooftop when he’d seen the boy failing, day after day. Instead, he’d buried his head in sand, Scotch and sin, far away from a love affair that had gone wrong, treating his job in the Middle East as heartbreak in exile. He’d relied on his riding instinct to get him through, that innate connection with Beck that he’d always taken for granted and ultimately abused. To his eternal shame, Luca had rather enjoyed the boy’s humiliation and his own breezy ability to get back on and show him how it was done. Look what money can’t buy you, kid.

  In the intervening years he’d found it easiest to see Mishaal as a pantomime baddy in Italian breeches and diamanté-crusted hard hat, a modern cliché of a moneyed sporting villain: spoilt, petulant, egotistical and vain, his limited talents as a rider outweighed by his father’s limitless purse, his ambition all-encompassing. Better by far to have chosen motor racing or yachts. Cars and boats had no sentience.

  Yet his conscience knew the young prince was a more complicated figure than that. Mishaal genuinely loved horses, his warrior steeds. The only son after a dozen daughters in a rigidly patriarchal family, his duty was to bring honour. Starved of affection, sent away to a strict English boarding school at eight, he was a far more serious character than his father: edgy, obsessive, not good at making human attachments. He’d seen the Olympics as the ultimate crusade. Poor coaching and over-spoiling were undoubtedly partly to blame for his bad riding, but more so the overwhelming expectation. If Luca had been on the ball, he’d have realised that the young prince would crack long before the toughest of his warrior horses.

  That breaking point had come on the eve of a competition to which his father had invited tens of grandees, eager to show off his brilliant son, losing not an option on the horse he’d paid millions for. Unwilling to admit fear or failure, the young prince had bribed his most corruptible groom to lame Beck, determined not only that he would never have to ride him again, but that nobody would. The plan had been simple; feed doped with sedative, one hard crack of a steel bar across a tendon. But the groom, also frightened of the stallion, had backed out at the last minute, agreeing only to keep watch. To protect himself, he’d hidden his phone in the eaves of the stable, recording the unwitting prince who had set about the task himself, armed with a taser and enough dope to knock out an elephant. Neither of them counted on Beck’s instinct for survival.

  The red mist of Mishaal’s humiliation had lent him ferocious cruelty. Unable to watch the horse struggling to escape the rain of electric shocks, the stable-hand had quickly fled. By the time Luca arrived on the scene, Beck had his attacker cornered. The sound of steel shoe cracking against bone had been like gunfire.

  Luca still had no idea how he’d pulled Mishaal out from beneath crashing hooves and teeth without getting struck, the unconscious prince’s face smashed and bloodied. His head injury had looked horrific, Luca fearing that even if the boy lasted the night, he would be permanently brain-damaged.

  He hadn’t accounted for the legendary toughness of the family, descendants of Islamic warriors who had crossed deserts bearing far worse injuries. Regaining consciousness en route to hospital, Mishaal was immediately calling for the horse’s destruction, his father in agreement, the order made to the veterinary team to do it that night.

  Watching Beck charging around now, Luca still remembered the war that
had raged inside him six years earlier when he’d waited with the horse, trying to calm him, sending up every prayer he knew.

  The luck of the Irish didn’t often shine on Luca, but it had that night. As Beck hammered the walls in a wild-eyed, shaking muck-sweat, guessing his fate, the phone belonging to the stable-hand had been dislodged from its hidey-hole and landed at Luca’s feet, its camera still recording.

  Later that night, offered any price he wanted to name in exchange for surrendering the phone and pledging his silence, he’d asked for Beck to be spared.

  Livid to find himself overruled by his father, Mishaal had suffered the humiliation of seeing the horse’s safe return to Germany, the Horsemaker rewarded for saving his life by sparing the very thing that had tried to end it. ‘You have made an enemy of me!’ he’d screamed at Luca when he’d visited him in hospital to take his leave. ‘It is written in the Qur’an and in your Bible – an eye for an eye.’

  To this day, Mishaal’s father, the royal prince, had made no more mention of the stallion or of what had really happened. It was rewritten as heroic myth: ‘You saved my only son’s life, Luca. I will repay your loyalty as any father would. You will stay under my protection always.’

  An eye for an eye.

  The stallion’s big, dark eyes shone brighter than ever as he switched direction, turning on his haunches, sending a large sand clot rattling against the metal wall. Years in the wilderness had lost him none of his élan.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Luca reflected angrily. The horse was supposed to be protected too, the door of his gilded cage kept shut. At Fuchs, with its Fort Knox security and army of incorruptible staff, he’d been safe.

  When Beck had been flown home to Europe after less than two months in the Middle East, a hastily fabricated buy-back story had been concocted to cover embarrassment and maintain honour all round, the royal family’s vet supplying X-rays and a report confirming that Bechstein had a severe meniscal injury which meant his jumping career was over. The horse would retire to Gestüt Fuchs to stand at stud; he would never be sold or compete again. It was Beck’s death pardon. The official line – that horse and rider had been injured entirely separately, one getting cast in his stable, the other in a high-speed car crash – ennobled a far less palatable truth.

  Nobody involved in Beck’s ignominious return wanted the deal to be public knowledge, because doing so risked the full story coming out. There had never been an insurance claim; the enormity of the sums involved meant the vet’s report would need to be verified to get a payout, and that couldn’t happen. The Arabs had lost millions of euros in the eight weeks they’d owned the horse. What Mishaal had lost was beyond price.

  ‘Paul Fuchs should never have sold him on again.’ He felt his sinews tighten. His former boss, former friend, had double-crossed him spectacularly.

  ‘That was my fault,’ Ronnie confessed as the husky, infectious voice launched into a story so typically old school Veronica Percy that it was deserving of clinking glasses, sponsors’ tents, tweed and tannoys. ‘I was at the Gestüt Fuchs’ stallions parade when this grey chap came out and wowed us all, breaking loose from his handler, cavorting around, jumping clean out of the arena and buggering off to gallop around for an hour, refusing to be caught. I’d never seen anything move like it. I absolutely fell in love with him. The Fuchs team were in despair because the horse was such a nightmare to handle. We were told he’d been retired to stud injured, but he certainly wasn’t lame that day.’

  Luca played with the head-collar clip, quietly incandescent. He was only a nightmare because they’d stopped handling him as he’d taught them. They should never have paraded him. Gestüt Fuchs was the only place Beck felt safe by the end. He’d known it all his life, its institutionalised enormity and rigid routine calming him like pink noise.

  ‘I told Paul about one we stood here in the seventies, Golden Orb,’ Ronnie went on cheerfully, ‘a Derby trials winner who’d bust a tendon and had become such a rapist in his Newmarket stud at coverings that my father got him dirt cheap. The only way to keep him sane was to keep him busy, so Daddy stuffed him full of bute and did everything with him: hacking, hunting, jumping, you name it, even broke him to harness. He pulled the village float. And, bingo, he was fabulous to his mares. Give him just one day off and he’d beat them up again.’

  It was Ronnie who had suggested Paul Fuchs put Beck back in work to settle the horse into his stud duties. ‘I’m surprised they didn’t ask you to do it, Luca.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he muttered, looking across at her, flashing a fast smile when she frowned. After he’d brought Beck back from the Middle East, Paul had never hired him again. It was, they had both agreed, for the best. When someone wanted you both dead, it was safest not to stand together too often. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Paul sent me a thank you message a few months later, a video of the horse looking a million dollars, popping one sixty at home then shagging the dummy like Valentino. I’d moved back to England by then and I forwarded the message to Henk, who shared the video on social media, the swine. It went viral – priapic horses are up there with cute cats on YouTube, I gather – and before you know it, a Lottery winner from Yorkshire, who was on a massive spending spree to fill her new bespoke stables, had asked “how much?”. Henk brokered the deal. Beck only had half a dozen foals on the ground at that point and none of them stood out, so Fuchs figured they had nothing to lose selling him. The woman didn’t even go over to Germany to see him. Henk got the impression she had a professional rider lined up, but apparently not. You can imagine the rest.’

  Luca should have guessed that Paul Fuchs would sell anything for the right price. Working in Brazil at the time, it was weeks before he’d heard of Beck leaving Gestüt Fuchs, his sense of betrayal overwhelming, torn apart imagining that Mishaal was somehow behind it, buying his revenge. If there was one living creature in existence that Prince Mishaal hated more than Luca O’Brien, it was Beck. He carried the scars of their battle to this day, a constant reminder of the horse that had stolen his looks and the vision in one eye.

  ‘Shame he missed a pop at the Olympics.’ Ronnie tilted her head cheerfully, sounding as though he’d missed out on a local hunter trial. ‘Meniscal injuries are notoriously tricky to diagnose, aren’t they?’

  Especially ones that are entirely fictional, Luca thought bitterly, imagining Paul’s delight when the offer came in. As it turned out, Mishaal seemed to have had nothing to do with it, his father as double-crossed by the wily German dealer as Luca had been. The prince had said nothing, making Luca question for the first time whether he was being protected or gagged under the beadily indulgent gaze of his royal patron.

  By breaking his word, Paul might have severed any future chance of selling to one of the richest horse-loving Arab states, but it had been a calculated risk, and it had apparently paid off richly. Beck had netted him a very fat profit not once, but twice.

  But away from the German stud, Becks was an open target. If Mishaal had gone after him at that point – and Luca had no way of knowing – it was the stallion’s volatility that had spared him, changing yards constantly, soon harder to trace than a stolen sports car. Having terrified his Lotto-winning owners and hospitalised at least one dealer, Beck had been sold on multiple times in the UK, Ronnie explained, swiftly disappearing under the radar, and getting madder and badder until an auctioneer friend who knew that she had an eye for a bargain tipped her off that there was something classy coming to his sales ring.

  ‘By then his progeny were starting to make seriously big names for themselves in Germany, so I was lucky nobody else spotted him. I wanted to give him to Daddy to stop this place going under, a peace offering, but the stubborn old bugger wouldn’t touch anything with warmblood in. He went to a friend instead, but that didn’t work out…’ She paused, watching the horse, her face momentarily sad. ‘He’s my bad penny. Or should that be Deutschmark?’

  ‘Euro.’

  She brightened. ‘He’s
worth a lot more than one of those. Paul doesn’t know I’ve found him yet, but he’d buy him back like a shot if he did. I very nearly drove Beck over there before I decided to stay here and try to make a go of it.’

  Luca didn’t hesitate. ‘Take him back there, Ronnie.’

  ‘That’s no longer an option.’

  ‘I’ll take him,’ he offered. ‘I’ll do it this week, bring you back something younger and easier to stand at stud here.’

  ‘Whoa!’ She held up her hands. ‘Much as they’d like this chap back now that he’s turned out to be the father of gold-plated superstars, we need him here. That,’ she told Luca determinedly, finger pointing into the pen, ‘is our future.’

  ‘Like fuck he is.’

  ‘Sharpen up, Luca.’ The blue eyes hardened, and he got a glimpse of what happened when the jolly hockey sticks were split over her knee, splintered ends brandished. ‘I didn’t invite you here to load my only bloody chance of making money straight in a lorry to head off on a road trip.’ She crossed her arms, watching him closely. ‘What do you know that you’re not telling me?’

  He weighed this up, already backtracking, smiling his way out of confrontation. Telling Ronnie the truth meant revealing his complicity in selling a brilliant young horse down the river. Telling her meant revealing how close Beck had come to killing a man. Telling her meant revealing that his loyalty had been bought and still was. His silence had been bought, he reminded himself.